At first glance, Mail seems to be a simple e-mail client, but there is quite a lot of power beneath its Spartan exterior. In time-honored Apple fashion, though, you do have to root around a bit to really get the most out of Mail. Neale Monks shows you how to use Mail's filters to keep out more spam along with other useful Mail tricks that you’ll soon find yourself using all the time.

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At first glance, Mail seems to be a simple e-mail client, but underneath its
Spartan exterior there’s actually quite a lot of power. In time-honored
Apple fashion, though, you do have to root about a bit to really get the most
out of Mail. Spam filtering is probably the most important feature for many
e-mail users, and Mail doesn’t disappoint here, having quite robust spam
filters built right out of the box. But it doesn’t catch every spam
message and doesn’t, for example, respect headers added to spam messages
by your ISP or mail server. To take advantage of that sort of
industrial-strength spam filtering, you need to learn how to look more closely
at your incoming e-mail messages and then write filters called rules that will
read the relevant headers and process any spam messages accordingly. These
filters are created and edited—unsurprisingly enough—in the Rules
section of the Preferences, and by arranging them in a particular order, you can
quite easily create very effective message filtering routines.

While writing new filters is one of the best ways to get Mail performing more
effectively, there are lots of other features available that aren’t always
obvious to the casual user. In this article, we’ll look at a couple of
these tricks as well. Mail’s virtual mailboxes known as Smart Mailboxes
are little used but actually rather useful once you understand how they work,
and they tie in quite nicely with Mail’s very powerful search capabilities
for finding particular messages in a hurry.

Circuit Training

Mail gets better at spotting spam over time, assuming that you make an effort
to train it. Whenever Mail marks a message as spam, take a moment to check that
the message really is spam. False positives (when Mail marks a legitimate
message as spam) are particularly troublesome because they can mean that might
not read important messages. So always take care to click the Not Junk button if
the message isn’t spam.

It’s very easy to overlook mailshots and just leave them in the Junk
folder, but Mail won’t always know the difference between a sales
promotion from an airline and a notification message about your upcoming
flights. On the other hand, manually marking messages as spam where Mail failed
to spot them will improve its built-in spam filter, so instead of simply
trashing such messages, be sure and mark them as spam, and then trash
them.

Figure 1 Mail’s
built-in spam filters are good, but they get better with training.